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Comment by gnfargbl | Hacker News Reader

The Imperial College researcher who builds these things describes his research here: https://www.imperial.ac.uk/centre-for-cold-matter/research/q...

The page claims that this device attempts to measure acceleration accurately enough that position can be determined (by integrating over time, twice).

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It's off topic however on the people page[0] of the above link, I enjoyed going through to try and spot the photoshopped in ones!

[0]https://www.imperial.ac.uk/centre-for-cold-matter/people/

That was fun. That whole left side has a lot of suspicious lighting, doesn't it?!

Indeed! There is also a mystery leg between the legs of the second chap in from the right.

I'm not a physicist but this reads like a more sensitive type of inertial navigation, which currently uses gyroscopes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inertial_navigation_system

Vacuum mechanical gyros were used until about the 1960's when lasers (RLGs) were introduced. In the 90's, some RLGs were replaced by HRGs where space is at a premium for Q around 1e7-8. Very large RLGs are still used to detect very slow rotation and can have Q factors on the order of 1e13.

Yes, also, while I have only worked on military boats and never on subs, I can straight away tell you that anyone who would know anything remotely interesting or close to the cutting edge regarding inertial navigation system for subs wouldn't be able to talk about it.

It's one of these subjects where you will never get anything better that vague press releases designed to justify research budgets.

So just a more precise dead reckoning? But it has a square law of precision so can never work for long enough anyway.

I couldn’t tell from the abstract but does the device measure the atom drift in 3 dimensions or do we need a sensor fusion of three atoms to get 3D translation?

In the TV show The Big Bang Theory, they invented a quantum vortex based inertial guidance system in 2016.

Initially in https://bigbangtheory.fandom.com/wiki/The_Positive_Negative_...

Then later https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=az44pMHvUYk

Came here to see if anyone else had noticed this too. :)

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